Five Takeaways: The Care Navigation Advantage — Accurate Provider Data + Quality Scores
Published on April 21, 2026
By: Ideon
Provider directory inaccuracy and the gap between "in-network" and "high-value" are two of the most persistent problems in care navigation — and they're rarely solved together. In most platforms today, fixing one still means managing a separate vendor, a separate integration, and a separate data pipeline for the other.
On April 14, Ideon hosted a live webinar with HealthCorum to show how that changes. Moderated by Ideon Senior Account Executive Brian Brock, the session brought together Colin Crihfield, Ideon's Director of Product Management, and Keith Somers, HealthCorum's Chief Revenue Officer and co-founder, for a candid conversation about provider directory accuracy, provider cost and quality scores, and what it takes to build a care navigation experience members can actually trust.
The conversation covered the underlying data challenges, how each company approaches accuracy and quality from different angles, and where the Ideon × HealthCorum partnership creates the most impact for care navigation platforms, benefits decision-support tools, and health plans.
Key takeaways
Provider directory accuracy is an ongoing process, not a one-time fix
Provider directory data is best understood as a living, breathing dataset with high variability. With 400+ carrier sources, daily refreshes, and both automated and manual QA, Ideon currently sees roughly one validated discrepancy per 5 million provider searches. ML-powered Address Confidence Scores — covering 19M+ provider addresses — give platforms an additional filter to remove low-likelihood locations before they ever surface to a member.
In-network status is a threshold, not a recommendation
There's a fundamental opacity in healthcare that doesn't exist in other industries. HealthCorum's provider quality scores — built on claims data across Commercial, Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and Medicare — give platforms the ability to surface not just who's in-network, but who's delivering high-value care. That distinction matters for member outcomes and for payer ROI.
Provider quality scoring requires rigor, not just ratings
HealthCorum scores 1.5M+ providers and 150K+ facilities using 300+ specialty-specific metrics across Effectiveness, Cost, and Appropriateness. Scores are risk-adjusted — so providers treating sicker populations aren't unfairly penalized — and the methodology is built to be transparent and defensible, not a black box.
A single care navigation API changes the developer equation
The operational simplicity of a single API is itself a meaningful product improvement — one vendor relationship, one data pipeline, one set of documentation, and the ability to return directory data and quality scores in the same API call. For teams building care navigation or provider search experiences at scale, that consolidation removes real complexity.
The use cases extend well beyond provider search
The session covered referral routing (where bad data causes some of the worst downstream harm), plan selection for ICHRA and benefits platforms (which plan has the strongest providers, not just the most?), and market intelligence for health plans evaluating new geographies. Existing Ideon customers can also enable HealthCorum data without a full re-integration — it's designed to layer in.
Watch the webinar recording
Colin and Keith go deeper on the technical approach behind each dataset, walk through real platform use cases, and answer audience questions on topics including network comparison, provider coverage breadth, and how Ideon handles conflicting data across carrier sources.
The Care Navigation Advantage: Accurate Provider Data + Quality Scores · April 14, 2026 · 45 min
Add provider cost and quality scores to your platform
IdeonSelect now delivers HealthCorum provider cost and quality scores alongside accurate directory data — locations, specialties, network participation, and more — through a single API. If you're building a care navigation, provider search, or plan selection experience and want to see how provider directory accuracy and quality ratings work together in practice, contact the Ideon team to schedule a walkthrough.